1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to serving a document to one or more clients from a remote server.
2. Related Art
Today, in any organization, a wide range of computer applications are used by individual users to perform the tasks and duties associated with their responsibilities. These users can be employees, suppliers, vendors, or customers. These applications range from simple desktop applications like Word, Excel, Powerpoint, to sophisticated server-based applications requiring specialized hardware and software like Oracle, Autocad, Spice, Nastran. Applications enable organizations to increase productivity in a number of ways. They can lead to revenue generation, better services, and increased levels of user knowledge.
Each application has to be installed on client systems. It has to be licensed on the client. For different applications, customized hardware may be required. In addition, different applications require different operating systems. Thus a user of a client system having a Windows operating system running on a single processor may wish to use an application requiring a Unix operating system with multiple processors. Further, users are geographically dispersed and have access to different client environments within the home or office.
In addition, the data and documents associated with an application can be dispersed at different locations. Getting the document from one location to another location and back becomes another tedious and time-consuming task.
An additional complication in many cases is that each person is required to have their own copy (usually an identical copy) of the document editing program (e.g,. Browser, the spreadsheet application, the word processing program, the image editing program, etc) required to view, create or modify the document. This is not only expensive in many cases, but also requires additional effort to install, maintain, and update the document editing programs on individual computer systems, referred to here as client computer systems.
One alternative method to this process is to travel to the remote location where the remote document or application is stored/served and perform the task of viewing or using the application to get the work done. The shortcoming with this method is that there may be significant travel time and travel cost in getting the user to the remote location. There may be an additional restriction that the xe2x80x9crightxe2x80x9d location is constrained to be the location with access to the xe2x80x9ccorrectxe2x80x9d document editing program.
There are significant costs in physically locating applications in a distributed environment, in choice of where the application executesxe2x80x94on the server, on the client or on some distributed combination. There are additional costs associated with the relative location of the data and the client and the means of connectivity.
Thus, it is highly desirable to have ubiquitous access to the applications and the data by providing a means for central document storage, and central application storing/serving.
A partial solution to this problem is provided by the Citrix Independent Computing Architecture http://www.citrix.com/products/ica.asp. In this method, the clients initially interface with a Citrix server. The Citrix server then determines the available server running Windows NT for serving the application and then enables the client to connect directly with the Windows NT server. At this point, the Citrix server is no longer necessary. The limitation of this solution is that once the application is invoked on the application server, the client communicates directly with the application server and bypasses the Citrix server. So the solution then degrades to a peer-to-peer architecture model, and the advantages of the client-server architecture are lost. Also this solution is limited to applications running the Windows operating system.
The present invention features an apparatus, method, and computer program product for instant serving of a remote document and or application. In one implementation, referred to as xe2x80x9cremote document serving,xe2x80x9d a file located on a remote application server is converted to a xe2x80x9cserved documentxe2x80x9d which is distributed to the user for review. The method of this implementation includes printing the file, on the application server, to a virtual printer from an application associate with the file, thereby creating a served document; and sending the served document to a remote client, whereby the served document is displaced at the remote client by a viewer application.
In another implementation, referred to as xe2x80x9cremote application serving,xe2x80x9d the xe2x80x9cownerxe2x80x9d of a remote document views and controls the screens created by an application located on a remote application server, where the document is associated with the application. The owner of the application serving session can view the screens and interact with the application. The method of this implementation includes invoking the application on a remote application server computer, generating an application screen. The application screen is sent to a virtual device, creating a virtual screen. The virtual screen is sent to a conferencing server for distribution to the remote computer used by the owner of the application serving session where the virtual screen is displayed by a viewer application. The owner can interact with the application. The owner edits the served screen, thereby generating user input that is sent to the conferencing server, which in turn sends the user input to the application server computer. The user input drives the application to edit the application screen based on the user input. In response, the application provides an application screen update. The application screen update is sent to the virtual device, thereby creating a virtual screen update. The virtual screen update is sent to the conferencing server for distribution to the remote computer, thereby updating the display of the application screen by the viewer application.
In all implementations, an annotation mode is available, where a transparent window is displayed over the served document. The owner can create objects to be displayed in the transparent window, thereby annotating the document.
One advantage of the present invention is that, by serving documents and applications in a client-server system, it provides robust, scalable, instant serving of remote documents and applications.
Another advantage of the present invention is that a document can be served to clients without distributing the original full-featured document to those clients. Thus a client cannot present a modified copy of the document as an original.
Another advantage of the present invention is that it permits clients to use an application without permitting them to copy that application. Thus, clients can be billed for the use of the application on a per-use basis. Other centralized administrative services can be provided such as logging of usage, and access control.
Yet another advantage of the present invention is that it allows ubiquitous access to applications from any client, independent of the choice of operating system. Thus a client computer can be running a Windows, Macintosh, or Unix operating system and can access documents and applications from computers running any of Unix, Windows, and Macintosh operating systems.
Another advantage of the present invention is that by isolating the client from the application server, security of the data is maintained and better fault-tolerance is provided. Thus, if a server containing the application fails for some reason, the same application can be served from another server without any changes to the client environment. Also applications, other services, documents, and capacity can all be added with ease and without affecting the client environment.